Front-Runner for Top O.C. Arts Job Drops From Race

COSTA MESA — The front-runner for the top executive post at the Orange County Performing Arts Center has taken himself out of the race.

Josiah A. Spaulding Jr. issued a statement in Boston saying he would not leave his job as head of the Wang Center for the Performing Arts there to become president and chief executive officer of Orange County’s largest arts institution.

“Although it is an honor to be considered a candidate,” he said, “I am committed to the Wang Center . . . and the arts community in Boston.”

In April, when the Los Angeles Times reported that he was one of four contenders for the center job, Spaulding, 45, denied he was in the running. His statement this week followed articles in the Boston Herald and Boston Globe that reported The Times’ story.

News that Spaulding had been talking with Orange County center officials surprised Wang officials. “I nearly choked on my cornflakes when I read it,” Wang vice chairman Robin Brown told the Herald.

Center officials here had no comment Tuesday, and Spaulding did not return phone calls.

According to sources close to the executive search, two other candidates are Jerry Mandel, a member of the center’s board and UC Irvine’s top fund-raiser, who now is the front-runner; and Louis G. Spisto, vice president and executive director of the Pacific Symphony, which is based in Santa Ana and plays regularly at the center.

Each has declined comment.

The fourth candidate reportedly is Stephen J. Albert, managing director of the Hartford Stage Company, a small professional resident theater in Connecticut, and former managing director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. But his candidacy here could not be confirmed, and sources in the arts community doubt that he would be a finalist for the top center job.

Korn/Ferry, a headhunting firm in Los Angeles that was hired by the center’s search committee, may have approached Albert. Korn/Ferry declined comment Tuesday, and Albert did not return phone calls.

*

Michael Blachly, director of the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts, said in a recent interview that he had been approached by Korn/Ferry “very, very early in the [search] process” but told the firm that he wasn’t in the running and was not contacted again.

The center, a privately funded, tax-exempt, nonprofit organization, has gone for more than nine months without a president, since Tom Tomlinson resigned under pressure for reasons that have never been explained.

Tomlinson was not the first top executive to leave the center under a cloud. In the fall of 1984, two years before the center opened, executive director Len Bedsow left amid conflicts with the board and the indignities of a sexual harassment suit brought against him by a center receptionist.

He was succeeded by Thomas R. Kendrick, who retired as president in June 1993 but who remains on the board of directors. Judith O’Dea Morr, who is married to Kendrick, is the current acting executive director. She took herself out of the running for the top post when a search was announced. The center has said she will remain as programming director.

Contributing to this report was Times staff writer Zan Dubin.